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Improving the tropical tree textures

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Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby vnts » Thu Feb 18, 2021 9:30 am

Split off from the topic New material definitions for three crop areas in Europe.


I've been looking at creating a high res/modern texture replacement for tropical.png&tropical-alt2.png, as well as trying to create a approach/workflow for extracting textures and processing to make the textures look good in-sim. I'll document what I found in the wiki eventually.

Topical-alt.png exists but appears to be a lot more for tropical islands (multiple coconut trees, banana trees etc.). It's also 1024x1024. The modern high quality textures like coniferous-alt.png or deciduous-alt.png are 2048.

4 unique trees in tropical-alt2.png. The texture is only 512x512. The rest are mirrored copies. This seems to be more a tropical forest/rainforest tree set(?). :
Image

Q1: The 3rd is a palm tree of some sort. Can anyone identify the the other 3 trees? There seem to be 4 spare slots, so other tree species that would fit in a generic tree set might be useful if I can find images.

The type of forest tree will do, I can look up the species. For the 4th tree, even a non-tropical tree that with a CC4 photo that could be recoloured might help. I don't know about identifying tree species from around the world (not learned the visual characteristics to differentiate plant species before, as much as much as I appreciate nature).

----

Replacement for the 3rd tree (Palm):

I don't know what the small set of green leaves represents. I was able to find this CC4 [1] photo on wikimedia commons. It seems the camera/filters/post-processing gave the leaves a yellowy look:
Image

One of the trees seems to have a small cluster of leaves - or something. So I guess these are the correct species. I copied the cluster to one of leaves to one of the other trees which were in sharper focus. I made holes in some of the leaf clums, as this plays to the strengths of the rendering technique that does texture detail fast - and as trees with leaf clumps that have gaps (maybe also due to strong branching) seem preferred in other texture sheets.
Image

I used a combination of the fuzzy select tool, and the free select tool with high zoom to separate the tree (and shorten it removing the shadow on the trunk. After that the Colors->map->Rotate colors tool worked incredibly well to recolour the photo - to remove the yellowy look, and match the types of bright colours in the texture sheet.

Q2: Does anyone know what causes the mismatch in the colours when viewed in GIMP compared with in-sim under midday light conditions? It seems colours have been shifted to blue, or look more muted. Is it just a perceptual adjustment to the perceived illuminant in the scene inside the sim? Is the current "look" correct - is there a specific setting like daylight or overcast to check? Is there an adjustment that needs to be made to get the perceived colours to match the GiMP colours - like using the colour temperature tool - what is the target colour 6500k, what is a good colour temp for an overcast image like this one? I guess colour temp doesn't matter so much if the approach is mainly overwriting the (often bad) photo lighting/colours and setting the desired colours by rotating colours and adjusting saturation/intensity.

These are successive alterations of colours using the rotate colours tool. They were done at noon at VTSP by modifying the block containing Rainforest south-east-asia.xml. In the end, for the last one, I tried increasing saturation for the greens and yellow to get more vibrant colours in-sim:
Image

Q3. The semi-transparent fringes seem to take on a whitish hue when they are viewed against the sky - see this image - it's visible both in the new set and the old trees. This might be due to them having a blue/white colour due to missing with the sky in the photo. Is this why, and is there a quick fix in GIMP?

Kind regards
Last edited by Johan G on Thu Feb 18, 2021 5:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Split off from the topic "New material definitions for three crop areas in Europe".
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Re: New material definitions for three crop areas in Europe

Postby erik » Thu Feb 18, 2021 10:41 am

Q1: The 3rd is a palm tree of some sort. Can anyone identify the the other 3 trees?

The right one seems to be a red pine, the other ones different types of palms:
https://www.homestratosphere.com/types-of-palm-trees/
Q2: Does anyone know what causes the mismatch in the colours when viewed in GIMP compared with in-sim under midday light conditions?

I suspect this is ALS kicking in, could you try fair weather and setting the rendering quality level to 0?
Q3. The semi-transparent fringes seem to take on a whitish hue .. is there a quick fix in GIMP?

I think the best is to make the shape edge fade to alpha.

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Re: New material definitions for three crop areas in Europe

Postby vnts » Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:08 pm

erik wrote in Thu Feb 18, 2021 10:41 am:
Q1: The 3rd is a palm tree of some sort. Can anyone identify the the other 3 trees?

The right one seems to be a red pine [..]

[..] the other ones different types of palms: https://www.homestratosphere.com/types-of-palm-trees/

Thanks :mrgreen: , the red pines seem to be a good match for the texture sheet. Google classifies those as either Pinus Densiflora (Japanese version) or Pinus Resinosa (EU). Wikimedia commons doesn't have a good CC4/CC0 photo, similar to the texture sheet. But it's a matter of going up one level in the taxonomy to find similar trees (which could perhaps be recoloured if needed) - link.

I was able to find several good trees which can be extracted with a bit of pruning/editing if needed. These could be used in Europe textures if nothing else: Pinus Sylvestris - [1] , [2] , [3]

The effective way to use Wikimedia commons seems to be to look up a specific species category, and then go up a level or two if more images are needed - looking at the thumbnails for trees which are extractable (after editing), complete, and have enough gaps in the canopy to look good with our rendering technique (they can be trimmed). Using the commons search gives too many results and other pictures it seems.

I'll have a look at to see what palms match.

If anyone has any suggestions of generic tropical forest trees for the other four slots in the texture sheet, I can try to search for GPL2 compatible images.

erik wrote in Thu Feb 18, 2021 10:41 am:
Q2: Does anyone know what causes the mismatch in the colours when viewed in GIMP compared with in-sim under midday light conditions?

I suspect this is ALS kicking in, could you try fair weather and setting the rendering quality level to 0?


Noon, near VTSP, with fair weather/core high pressure region. In order: Texture sheet, shader quality 5, shader quality 0:
Image
I tried copying the center of the tree to a separate image, to try to eliminate some of the contextual perceptual cues (although previously seeing the images probably can still affect it a bit):
Image
Album with screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/gXKqC8C

This seems to suggest the in-sim textures are actually muted, at least to my eyes(?). So not sure if this is as it should be under midday conditions, and what the correct procedure should be with regards to colour/colour temperature adjustment from photos to textures.

erik wrote in Thu Feb 18, 2021 10:41 am:
Q3. The semi-transparent fringes seem to take on a whitish hue .. is there a quick fix in GIMP?

I think the best is to make the shape edge fade to alpha.

Fade to alpha is trickier for this type of image which have legitimately whitish areas, so for the moment I made a selection of the border areas and applied it to that (to select the border region I used: select regions with similar colours to select the transparent areas, saved empty areas to a channel, inverted selection to get the leaves, used shrink selection by 1, subtracted the empty areas in the channel from the selection).

What is ideally needed are pure leaf/tree colours at the border, but made transparent. The issue is border colours are mostly bluish-sky & slightly green leaf colour. With fade to alpha the border colours are kept and the effect has to be transparent enough so the colours becomes negligible - to be satisfactory it probably needs a stronger transparency than desired and is more similar to removing the border. A solution possibly involves obtaining transparency by fade to alpha, and doing a separate rework of the border regions to remove blue or just map it to leaf colours, and combing the transparency. Don't know of a simple / elegant way to get transparent leaf/tree colours yet, so it can be documented as a good workflow.

Kind regards
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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby wkitty42 » Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:52 pm

vnts wrote in Thu Feb 18, 2021 9:30 am:One of the trees seems to have a small cluster of leaves - or something. So I guess these are the correct species. I copied the cluster to one of leaves to one of the other trees which were in sharper focus. I made holes in some of the leaf clums, as this plays to the strengths of the rendering technique that does texture detail fast - and as trees with leaf clumps that have gaps (maybe also due to strong branching) seem preferred in other texture sheets.
Image

that leaf blob in the middle looks to me to be something from another type of skinny-trunk tree in front of the palm or something off a vine growing up the palm trunk... i've never seen a palm with two different types of leaves like these... certainly nothing part way up the trunk...
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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby merspieler » Sat Feb 20, 2021 12:45 am

Looks amazing... Can't wait to see these together with the Aussie and ortho scenery...
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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby Thorsten » Sat Feb 20, 2021 8:57 am

This seems to be more a tropical forest/rainforest tree set(?). :


Well. A real rainforest would be characterized by the extremely high number of different species - when you look at a hectar of boreal forest, there's three or four types of trees only (mainly birch, pine and spruce) - when you look at a hectar of tropical forest, chances are no two trees are the same species - theres literally hundreds of different tree species.

So any tree sheet should make full use of different species.

The second point is epiphytes

that leaf blob in the middle looks to me to be something from another type of skinny-trunk tree in front of the palm or something off a vine growing up the palm trunk..


it is normal and commonplace for many plant species to live on trees - in rainforest you don't need roots to gather water because it's very humid anyway, but you do need light, so the real estate on top of a tree which gets you closer to the light becomes really attractive. So you'd expect to see different kind of foliage on any treopical tree picture.
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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby erik » Sat Feb 20, 2021 9:21 am

vnts wrote in Thu Feb 18, 2021 9:30 am:Q3. The semi-transparent fringes seem to take on a whitish hue when they are viewed against the sky - see this image - it's visible both in the new set and the old trees. This might be due to them having a blue/white colour due to missing with the sky in the photo. Is this why, and is there a quick fix in GIMP?


I've found a quick and dirty solution:

1. Select Colors -> Hue-Saturation
2. Check the B (blue) checkbox
3. move all three Hue, Lightness and Saturation bars to the left.

vnts wrote in Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:08 pm:If anyone has any suggestions of generic tropical forest trees for the other four slots in the texture sheet, I can try to search for GPL2 compatible images.


I've found two more:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... 389513.jpg
Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... cifera.jpg
Image

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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby erik » Sat Feb 20, 2021 3:26 pm

Another one, in dry and lush condition:

https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1341983
Image
Image

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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby erik » Sun Feb 21, 2021 10:57 am

I've just updated the textures as I noticed the edges where still a bit troublesome.
Hint to myself: check them against a black background an not white.

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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby radi » Wed Feb 24, 2021 1:37 pm

Semi-related: I don't have FG installed currently so can't easily check, but I think I created
what's now tropical-alt.png. I still have the original 8192x2048 texture. PM if interested.

Also, just in case you haven't seen these:
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Creat ... and_bushes
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Creat ... otos#Trees
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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby erik » Fri Feb 26, 2021 11:49 am

The source of this image as shown by wiki turns out to be a real treasure trove and they are all CC licensed:
http://www.starrenvironmental.com/images/

erik wrote in Sat Feb 20, 2021 9:21 am:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Starr_031209-0059_Cocos_nucifera.jpg
Image


Image
Image

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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby vnts » Fri Feb 26, 2021 1:07 pm

Thorsten wrote in Sat Feb 20, 2021 8:57 am:
This seems to be more a tropical forest/rainforest tree set(?). :

Well. A real rainforest would be characterized by the extremely high number of different species - when you look at a hectar of boreal forest, there's three or four types of trees only (mainly birch, pine and spruce) - when you look at a hectar of tropical forest, chances are no two trees are the same species - theres literally hundreds of different tree species.

So any tree sheet should make full use of different species.

I see, interesting. The question is what are the more tropical common warmer weather tree types (Maybe it's worth doing a 16 tree texture if/when enough tree textures become available. I guess it's possible to reduce texture size for evergreen forests by changing the tree shader to only look at 2 rows depending on a uniform flag. I may look at it once the tree RAM/VRAM occupancy changes are tested/profiled/integrated.).

This paper [1] on South American tropical forests suggests that there are still common tree species that make up the bulk of trees, but they number in 10s for tropical forests rather than a handful for EU forests. The paper mentions these specific species "Iriartea deltoidea, Matisia ochrocalyx, sensu latu, Brownea grandiceps" and these species in these families in the taxonomy: "Arecaceae(6*) - i.e. palms, Moraceae(6*) - Figs/Mulberry etc. , Myristicaceae - incl nutmeg (4*),Violaceae(3*), Lauraceae(6), Annonaceae(5) , Myrtaceae(5*),Sapindaceae(3),Melastomataceae(3),Chrysobalanaceae(2)". But that's for this region (which is also even more diverse ) I guess.

----

I've had a look at Moraceae( 1 , 2 ), Myristicaceae (only this nutmeg: 3 ) ,Violaceae( none found) , Lauraceae (none found).

The fastest way seems to be a) to look up the "species of X" category in wiki media commons listen in the category page - e.g. Myristicaceae . b) open all the subcategories by middleclicking in firefox, then glance through thumbnails in the windows for trees against sky by closing the tabs. Most of the complete, extractable photos aren't compatible with GPL as they are earlier versions of CC or GFDL. On the other hand we only need 8 to 16 images.

I'll look through the rest of the tree families common to both forests, and then the others - these have limited images mostly, maybe as they are from South America. Not sure if there's a list of common families.

Also found some tree ferns (Cyathea): 1 , 2 , 3 . These are probably suitable for rain-forest set, rather than tropical evergreen/broad-leaved forest - eventually the textures should be split into individual trees, and used with the new texture arrays which would make it easier to work with.

Those look great. They seem to be earlier versions of the CC4 license? There are lots of good quality images in CC3 and earlier on Wikimedia Commons, but few under CC4.

The 3rd one is CC0. I saved it to archive.org for proof of permission.

The 2nd one seems to be Cocos nucifera, or normal coconut tree. There other coastal tropical texture have several of those, although those are the direr versions.
There is also a CC4 greener version under the Cocos Nulifera category: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palme_cuba.jpg
erik wrote in Fri Feb 26, 2021 11:49 am:The source of this image as shown by wiki turns out to be a real treasure trove and they are all CC licensed:
http://www.starrenvironmental.com/images/

Oh this is good! They are updated to the new CC4 license : http://www.starrenvironmental.com/imageusepolicy/

I'll save the permissions to archive.org, and I guess saving another snapshot after finishing the texture sheets will count as proof in case the license changes in future.

I had come across a lot of photos from Starr (that site) on wikimedia commons, unfortunately the ones uploaded are all earlier CC :( (The solution might be for wikimedia commons to do an auto-notification if people have older licensed images, and allow them to add CC4 as a license.) I will have to back track.

I would guess there might be enough there for a tropical set, and maybe some useful trees for more temperate northern hemisphere forests.

radi wrote in Wed Feb 24, 2021 1:37 pm:Semi-related: I don't have FG installed currently so can't easily check, but I think I created
what's now tropical-alt.png. I still have the original 8192x2048 texture. PM if interested.

Also, just in case you haven't seen these:
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Creat ... and_bushes
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Creat ... otos#Trees


Thanks, the original would be useful - the current high quality standard is 2048x2048 while tropical-alt is 1024x1024.

Ideally there should be a repo where the original sources, and the processed texture can be stored, before it's shrunk to fit the texture sheet. I'm leaving the shrinking as the last step so I can keep the sources as high res as possible.

That wiki page is pretty useful (I had previously updated what I learned on sources and while working with ground textures).

Kind regards
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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby Johan G » Tue Mar 02, 2021 11:39 pm

vnts wrote in Fri Feb 26, 2021 1:07 pm:[...] I saved it to archive.org for proof of permission.

Probably not a bad idea. :)
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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby radi » Mon Mar 08, 2021 3:28 am

vnts wrote in Fri Feb 26, 2021 1:07 pm:Thanks, the original would be useful - the current high quality standard is 2048x2048 while tropical-alt is 1024x1024.


Here's the 8K source:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wtzxod8pnapz ... yjGha?dl=0
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Re: Improving the tropical tree textures

Postby Volador » Mon Dec 04, 2023 8:31 pm

Did this work ever find it's way into an atlas? I was about to try make a new atlas for tropical trees using stable diffusion and stumbled on the thread, no point reinventing the wheel.
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